Age verification laws like the UK’s Online Safety Act are meant to protect children from harmful content, but they also increase the risks of surveillance and an internet that’s not anonymous. But what is age verification, and will it do more harm than good?
There’s no question that accessing social media should be age restricted to those over 16, it’s the implementation that’s the problem.
Regardless of implementation, that can never work. There’s always going to be platforms in counties without age verification and children will just use those instead.
The solution is parents actually fucking parenting their children because the government literally can’t solve the problem without going full China-mode.
Seeing the Ethernet cable /wifi password as 16+ would help a lot.